Dasein Science

This is a blog devoted to researching the cognitive effects of Virtual and Augmented Reality.
Our Research Question is - "How can synthetic embodied VR/AR environments enhance aspects of human cognition?"
The blog shows outcomes of our research projects, such as papers, videos, paper reviews and other useful artifacts.

This is a call for contributions for the *Data Analytics Applications in Gaming and Entertainment* book to be published by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group in late 2018. The book is part of the Data Analytics Applications book series edited by Jay Liebowitz.

*Outline*

The last decade has witnessed the rise of big data in game development as the increasing proliferation of Internet-enabled gaming devices has made it easier than ever before to collect large amounts of player-related data. At the same time the emergence of new business models and the diversification of the player base have exposed a broader potential audience which attaches great importance to being able to tailor game experiences to a wide range of preferences and skill levels. This, in turn, has led to a growing interest in data mining techniques as they offer new opportunities for deriving actionable insights in order to inform game design, to ensure customer satisfaction, to maximize revenues, and to drive technical innovation.

This volume seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of data mining applications pertaining to all aspects of gaming and entertainment. It is intended to serve as a reference volume for academics and practitioners alike. The book will be structured along four main themes, covering different aspects of data mining in games. Possible topics of interest for each of the themes are listed below.

*Important Dates*

July 31, 2017 Deadline for chapter proposals

September 15, 2017 Notification of proposal acceptance

January 30, 2018 Draft chapters due

April 15, 2018 Editorial feedback and comments from reviewers returned to authors

May 30, 2018 Revised chapters due

July, 15, 2018 All chapters send to publisher

*Themes and Topics of Interest*

o) Introductory chapters to game data mining

Introductory chapters aimed at explaining common techniques used in the context of game data mining and data-driven game development. For example, overview chapters explaining data mining techniques such as clustering methods or pattern mining and their application in the gaming domain.

o) Data mining for games user research

Contributions pertaining to issues related to games analytics and directed towards understanding player behavior and informing games user research. Topics of interest include, among others, player profiling and modeling, behavioral analysis, understanding player communities and social structures, churn prediction and retention analysis, balancing of in-game economies, or monetization.

o) Data mining for game technology

Contributions concerning technical aspects of game development which make use of large-scale datasets such as data-driven approaches to game AI, dynamic difficulty adjustment, and procedural content or level generation.

o) Visualization of large-scale game data

Contributions dealing with the visualization of in-game data for the purpose of exploration, analysis, knowledge discovery, and communication. This includes, but is not limited to spatio-temporal visualization approaches, multi-modal data visualization, visual analytics tools, and time-based visualizations.

This list is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive. If you have any suggestion for an interesting chapter not covered here please get in touch.

*Contribution Formats*

o) Research articles covering all aspects of data mining in gaming or entertainment. Such chapters may describe novel approaches, methods, or research findings. Chapters reviewing common techniques or discussing the state-of-the-art in game data mining are also within the scope of the book.

o) Case studies describing the application of data-mining technique in practical settings. We especially welcome case studies from industry experts. Case studies may cover one or multiple themes. For example, case studies may describe best practices or lessons learned, e.g., by highlighting what went right and wrong in data-driven game development (such as, for example, Gamasutra style post-mortems).

*Proposal Submission*

Proposals should not exceed 600 words and should include a tentative title, a short description/outline of the chapter, author names, affiliations and a brief biography. Submission should be previously unpublished and should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Please send your proposals via e-mail to guenter.wallner@uni-ak.ac.at. Deadline for submission of chapter proposals is July 31th 2017* although early submissions are encouraged.

The final chapter should be around 20-25 double-spaced pages (incl. figures and tables). Templates for formatting the chapter itself will be provided in due time.

Proposals will be used to evaluate if the proposed chapter fits the topic of the book. All accepted chapters will then undergo a double-blind review process. For additional inquiries and advice on the potential suitability of any proposed chapter please e-mail me at guenter.wallner@uni-ak.ac.at.

The representation of business process models has been a continuing research topic for many years now.However, many process model representations have not developed beyond minimally interactive 2D icon-based representations of directed graphs and networks, with little or no annotation for information overlays.In addition, very few of these representations have undergone a thorough analysis or design process with reference to psychological theories on data and process visualization.This dearth of visualization research, we believe, has led to problems with BPM uptake in some organizations, as the representations can be difficult for stakeholders to understand, and thus remains an open research question for the BPM community.In addition, business analysts and process modeling experts themselves need visual representations that are able to assist with key BPM life cycle tasks in the process of generating optimal solutions.

With the rise of desktop computers and commodity mobile devices capable of supporting rich interactive 3D environments, we believe that much of the research performed in computer human interaction, virtual reality, games and interactive entertainment have much potential in areas of BPM; to engage, provide insight, and to promote collaboration amongst analysts and stakeholders alike.We believe this is a timely topic, with research emerging in a number of places around the globe, relevant to this workshop.

This visualization workshop seeks to develop into a high quality international forum to present and discuss research in this field.Via this workshop, we intend to create a community to unify and nurture the development of process visualization topics as a continuing research area.Furthermore, this workshop will seek to strengthen and provide diversity to the BPM conference and collaboration with other researchers in the field, as such visualization approaches have many domains of application.

Workshop Theme

Visualizations can make the structure and dependencies between elements in processes accessible in order to support users who need to analyze process models and their instances. However, effectively visualizing processes in a user-friendly way is often a big challenge, especially for complex process models, which can consist of hundreds of process components (e.g., process activities, data flows, and resources) and thousands of running process instances in different execution states.

Many challenges remain to be addressed within the broad area of process visualization, human interaction and user led design such as: scalability, human-computer interaction, cognitive aspects, applicability of different approaches, collaboration, process evolution, run-time requirements of process instances and applications, user-engagement etc.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

•Visual Metaphors in Processes

•Visual Design and Aesthetics for Processes

•Visualization of Dynamic Data in Processes

•Change Visualization for Processes

•Interface and Interaction Techniques for Process Visualization

•Visualization Techniques for Collaboration and Distributed Processes

•Visualization of Large-scale Processes

•Cognition and Perception in Process Visualization

•Evaluation and User Studies of Process Visualization

•Evaluation Methods for Human Aspects in PAIS

•Visual Modeling Languages

•Analysis Techniques and Visualization for Processes

•Process Visualization of Large Screens

•Mobile Process Visualization

•Visualization Tools and Systems for Processes

•Visualization Techniques for Processes

•Process Visualization and Sonification

•Virtual World Process Visualization

·Immersive Process Modeling Approaches

·Human Computer Interaction Design Applied to Process Systems

•3D Process Visualization Approaches

•Human-centric aspects in business process management

•User-centered design for BPM

•User Interface design for Processes

Format of the Workshop

The half day workshop will comprise accepted papers and tool evaluations. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee.

This year will also include an innovation in the program.Part of the workshop time (depending on the number of prototype submissions) will be set aside for focus group assessments of tools.We will be requesting tool report authors, successful workshop paper authors and panel members attending BPM, to assist in the assessment of demonstration visualization techniques and software.This evaluation process will be a service to attendees, as these heuristic assessments can be written up later as separate papers, or by the workshop chairs as an aggregated workshop outcome.Such evaluations will be an exciting addition to the workshop, as people experienced in Information Visualization, BPM, HCI and related fields, will provide detailed feedback on your prototypes.The evaluation approach is largely in the hands of the tool report writers, but at a minimum, should involve direct interaction with your software and some form of validation via a questionnaire.

All accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series. There will be a single LNBIP volume dedicated to the proceedings of all BPM workshops. As this volume will appear after the conference, there will be informal proceedings during the workshop. At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop and present the paper.

Intended Audience

Researchers, practitioners and software vendors in the BPM space performing research into using graphics and interaction techniques to provide process visualizations across many topics will find this workshop to be of interest.

Important Dates

Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 26 May 2017

Notification of Acceptance: 26 June 2017

Camera-ready version: 7 July 2017

TAProViz Workshop: 11 September 2017

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above.

Three types of submissions are possible:

(1) full papers (12 pages long) reporting mature research results

(2) position papers reporting research that may be in preliminary stage that has not yet been evaluated

(3) tool reports, to be evaluated at the workshop

Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages.

Only papers in English will be accepted and must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere. Papers should be submitted in the « LNBIP» format. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper/position paper/tool report).

All accepted workshop papers will be published by Springer as a post-workshop proceedings volume in the series Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP). Hard copies of these proceedings will be shipped to all registered participants approximately four months after the workshops, while preliminary proceedings will be distributed during the workshop.

Submitted papers will be evaluated, in a double blind manner, on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. Papers should clearly establish their research contribution and the relation to the theory and application of process visualization.

Tool reports should include a brief evaluation plan as an appendix, for the evaluation session at the workshop on the day.

The representation of business process models has been
a continuing research topic for many years now.However, many process model representations have not developed beyond
minimally interactive 2D icon-based representations of directed graphs and
networks, with little or no annotation for information overlays.In addition, very few of these
representations have undergone a thorough analysis or design process with
reference to psychological theories on data and process visualization.This dearth of visualization research, we
believe, has led to problems with BPM uptake in some organizations, as the
representations can be difficult for stakeholders to understand, and thus
remains an open research question for the BPM community.In addition, business analysts and process
modeling experts themselves need visual representations that are able to assist
with key BPM life cycle tasks in the process of generating optimal solutions.

With the
rise of desktop computers and commodity mobile devices capable of supporting
rich interactive 3D environments, we believe that much of the research
performed in computer human interaction, virtual reality, games and interactive
entertainment have much potential in areas of BPM; to engage, provide insight,
and to promote collaboration amongst analysts and stakeholders alike.We believe this is a timely topic, with
research emerging in a number of places around the globe, relevant to this
workshop.

This
visualization workshop seeks to develop into a high quality international forum
to present and discuss research in this field.Via this workshop, we intend to create a community to unify and nurture
the development of process visualization topics as a continuing research area.Furthermore, this workshop will seek to strengthen
and provide diversity to the BPM conference and collaboration with other
researchers in the field, as such visualization approaches have many domains of
application.

Workshop Theme

Visualizations
can make the structure and dependencies between elements in processes
accessible in order to support users who need to analyze process models and
their instances. However, effectively visualizing processes in a user-friendly
way is often a big challenge, especially for complex process models, which can
consist of hundreds of process components (e.g., process activities, data
flows, and resources) and thousands of running process instances in different
execution states.

Many challenges remain to be
addressed within the broad area of process visualization, human interaction and
user led design such as: scalability, human-computer interaction, cognitive
aspects, applicability of different approaches, collaboration, process
evolution, run-time requirements of process instances and applications, user-engagement
etc.

Topics of interest include (but are not
limited to):

•Visual
Metaphors in Processes

•Visual
Design and Aesthetics for Processes

•Visualization
of Dynamic Data in Processes

•Change
Visualization for Processes

•Interface
and Interaction Techniques for Process Visualization

•Visualization
Techniques for Collaboration and Distributed Processes

•Visualization
of Large-scale Processes

•Cognition
and Perception in Process Visualization

•Evaluation
and User Studies of Process Visualization

•Evaluation Methods for Human Aspects in PAIS

•Visual
Modeling Languages

•Analysis
Techniques and Visualization for Processes

•Process
Visualization of Large Screens

•Mobile
Process Visualization

•Visualization
Tools and Systems for Processes

•Visualization
Techniques for Processes

•Process
Visualization and Sonification

•Virtual
World Process Visualization

·Immersive
Process Modeling Approaches

·Human
Computer Interaction Design Applied to Process Systems

•3D
Process Visualization Approaches

•Human-centric
aspects in business process management

•User-centered
design for BPM

•User Interface
design for Processes

Format of the Workshop

The half day
workshop will comprise accepted papers and tool evaluations. Papers should be
submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the
program committee.

This year will also include an innovation
in the program.Part of the workshop
time (depending on the number of prototype submissions) will be set aside for
focus group assessments of tools.We
will be requesting tool report authors, successful workshop paper authors and
panel members attending BPM, to assist in the assessment of demonstration
visualization techniques and software.This evaluation process will be a service to attendees, as these
heuristic assessments can be written up later as separate papers, or by the
workshop chairs as an aggregated workshop outcome.Such evaluations will be an exciting addition
to the workshop, as people experienced in Information Visualization, BPM, HCI
and related fields, will provide detailed feedback on your prototypes.The evaluation approach is largely in the
hands of the tool report writers, but at a minimum, should involve direct
interaction with your software and some form of validation via a questionnaire.

All accepted papers will appear in the
workshop proceedings published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Business
Information Processing (LNBIP) series. There will be a single LNBIP volume
dedicated to the proceedings of all BPM workshops. As this volume will appear
after the conference, there will be informal proceedings during the workshop.
At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop
and present the paper.

Intended Audience

Researchers, practitioners and software
vendors in the BPM space performing research into using graphics and
interaction techniques to provide process visualizations across many topics
will find this workshop to be of interest.

Important Dates

Deadline
for workshop paper submissions: 26 May 2017

Notification of Acceptance: 26 June 2017

Camera-ready version: 7 July 2017

TAProViz
Workshop: 11 September 2017

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers
for presentation in any of the areas listed above.

Three types of submissions are possible:

(1) full papers (12 pages long) reporting
mature research results

(2) position papers reporting research that
may be in preliminary stage that has not yet been evaluated

(3) tool reports, to be evaluated at the
workshop

Position papers and tool reports should be no
longer than 6 pages.

Only papers in English will be accepted and must
present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere.
Papers should be submitted in the «
LNBIP» format. The title page must contain a short
abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of
topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper/position
paper/tool report).

All accepted workshop papers will be published by
Springer as a post-workshop proceedings volume in the series Lecture Notes in
Business Information Processing (LNBIP). Hard copies of these proceedings will
be shipped to all registered participants approximately four months after the
workshops, while preliminary proceedings will be distributed during the
workshop.

Submitted papers will be evaluated, in a double
blind manner, on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality, and
exposition. Papers should clearly establish their research contribution and the
relation to the theory and application of process visualization.

Tool reports should include a brief evaluation plan
as an appendix, for the evaluation session at the workshop on the day.